During a recent visit to Namco's E3 booth we were able to get our hands on a two-level demo of We Love Katamari, the slightly oddly named sequel to last year's Katamari Damacy. The first of the two levels that we got to take a look at was referred to simply as the "snowman level," which made perfect sense since it required us to make a head for a snowman. The level served as a great demonstration of the variety that Namco is looking to inject into We Love Katamari, since rolling up snow was a quite different experience from rolling up objects of increasingly larger sizes.

　　There were a handful of objects scattered around the snow-covered park that we were able to roll into our snowball and plenty of ice skaters that we no doubt could have added to our ball had it gotten big enough. The objective of this particular mission wasn't to make the biggest ball possible, though; it was simply to make the best snowman head that we could. We're not entirely sure what the King of All Cosmos's definition of good was since the entire demo was in Japanese, but on reflection we're pretty sure that the objects scattered throughout the park should have been used to add facial features to our ball before we rolled it onto the body in the middle of the level.

　　Before we went on to try out We Love Katamari's all-new cooperative play, we were told about another of the unusual levels that will feature in the game. We weren't told a whole lot about "the underwater level," but we can tell you that the game's physics will behave quite differently down there and that fisherman's hooks will be an ever-present danger to the diminutive prince character that you play as.

　　You'll be able to unlock additional playable characters in We Love Katamari, incidentally, in the form of the prince's many cousins who are hiding in each level along with presents similar to those in the original game. The new characters won't have any different abilities, but we can report that some of them are even stranger looking than their royal cousin.

　　For our cooperative play session we returned to the schoolhouse level that we first saw at Namco's pre-E3 event in San Francisco a while back. The Namco representative showing us the game controlled the prince, we controlled one of his cousins, and we both attempted to control a single katamari. The two cousins stood next to each other as they pushed the katamari around the level, and the cooperative controls basically equated to the pair of us controlling one analog stick each in the single-player game. We had to push up or down on both of our sticks for it to register, though, and if we attempted to push them in opposite directions, our character would simply spin around on the spot. The cooperative game was a lot of fun, but if the two of you who are playing don't communicate with each other you might as well give up before you start.

　　We Love Katamari is currently scheduled for release in the fourth quarter of this year. We'll bring you more information on the game as soon as it becomes available.